Friday, May 26, 2006

Faux

While (Ian) Spiegelman has called Page Six the "attack arm" of Rupert Murdoch's tabloid, he said Murdoch's News Corp. "will go all out to flatter every thug communist in China when it thinks it can score a satellite-TV deal there."

"One time I was looking into an item about a Chinese diplomat and a strip club when word came from somewhere up above that China had carte blanche," he adds.

"The message I got was more or less, 'If you mention Chinese, you'd better be ordering lunch.'"

Enemies included "anyone who thought the war in Iraq might not be the best of all possible adventures to pursue," says Spiegelman. "On several occasions I had to quote some homophobic press release from the Catholic League because [some editor] thought they made a good point."